Paradise Man (9 page)

The convoy arrived at Red Mike’s simple estate near the veterans’ center in St. Albans. Sometimes soldiers and sailors would drift out of the center in their uniforms and Holden would think of his dad, while he was having lunch on Red Mike’s lawn, the soldiers staring through Mike’s wire fence, starved for company. Mike would often let them through the gate, give them food and comfort until their keepers arrived. And Holden would look for the nearest sergeant among the runaway soldiers and have long conversations on every subject.

But there wasn’t a sergeant inside the gate. Holden recognized Edmundo’s people. They stood on the lawn in black shoes, waiting for their commandant. Holden realized that whatever Pinzolos were left had become prisoners on their own estate.

Holden walked into Red Mike’s house with Don Edmundo. He was startled to meet Mike’s dad, who should have been on Rikers Island. Old man Leopardo. He was wearing one of Red Mike’s suits. He must have shrunk a little in the can. Leopardo seemed much heftier a year ago. He’d come out of Rikers to preside over the ruin of his family.

“I’m sorry,” Holden said. But the old guy wouldn’t answer in front of Don Edmundo. Holden went with him to the window, where Leopardo loved to stand and look at all the grass his son had accumulated.

“Holden,” Leopardo whispered, “I’m glad it was you and not a stranger ... I wouldn’t want my sons butchered by someone’s hired hand. What the fuck happened to your head?”

“Carmen went for me with a hammer.”

“She did that? I’ll smash her face. She had no business mixing in men’s affairs. Mikey loved you like a brother.”

“Leo, he shouldn’t have kidnapped Abruzzi’s daughter-in-law. I had to get into the act. Mike must have known that. It became a tribal thing.”

“He was a hothead, my Mike. He could have buttoned up Abruzzi. But he wanted to steal something that would humiliate the son of a bitch, make him suffer. The D.A. comes down on us like it was a blood feud or something. It wasn’t fair. We contributed to his campaign. My own boys were his precinct captains. And then he dumps on the Pinzolos. Christ, we put up his name to the Democrats, we sponsored the man, and the first time we lose a little popularity, he pounces on us. Mikey didn’t kill. He didn’t send his shooters out. He grabbed the girl ... he would have given her back.”

“Couldn’t he have telephoned me?”

“Mikey didn’t want to put you in the middle.”

“He should have called ...”

“He had his pride,” Leopardo said. “He took the girl and lived with the consequences.”

“But Leo, it was a waste.”

“Not for us. My boys had to follow it to the end. We gave Abruzzi a shit fit. That was the important thing.”

“Leo, I—”

“Shh, Holden, it’s done.”

The old man turned away from the window, and Holden was left with that view of the grass. He could have sworn there was a soldier outside the gate, his uniform slashed by wire. But it was a phantom, encouraged by that blow on the head. Holden blinked and the soldier was there again, and he wondered what strange powers Carmen had given him. He traveled through the house looking for her. He covered room after room, cluttered with Mike’s trophies and hunting guns, Rat’s collection of comic books and baseball cards, like the dross of someone’s childhood, only Rat was involved with comics until the afternoon he died. Holden couldn’t catch a trace of Eddie in the house. A toy, a gift, a photograph? Eddie was gone.

Holden could hear voices coming from the third floor. He bumped in and out of rooms until he located Carmen and her sisters in an upstairs den. The Pinzolo girls, Dotty, Josephine, Laura, Luiza, and Carmen, lovely, dark, and unmarried in the bower Red Mike had provided for them. Josephine was a grand old lady of twenty-nine. Dot was twenty-six. Carmen was twenty and had troubled Mike the most. She’d never have returned to the house if Don Edmundo hadn’t been holding her here.

Carmen lowered her eyes, but the other sisters looked at him with a certain sadness, as if they couldn’t stop loving the executioner. Holden wanted to take them in his arms, but he didn’t dare. He’d lost that right in Far Rockaway.

“Carmen, Mikey knew I’d have to come for him. He’d have come for me if—”

“He’d never have come for you, not Mike. He’d have told the Five Families and all the Puerto Rican dons to go to hell.”

“Edmundo’s not Puerto Rican,” Holden said.

Carmen locked herself in the toilet behind the den.

Holden rattled the doorknob. “Carmen, talk to me.”

“The only reason you’re alive,” she shouted from her vantage of the door, “is that the Puerto Rican said he’d kill papa if I hit you one more time.”

“He’s bluffing, Carmen. He wouldn’t dare. He knows I love you. And he’s not Puerto Rican. He’s a Cuban hero. Comes from the Bay of Pigs.”

“Who remembers? I wasn’t even born,” she said.

“Carmen?”

“Go away.”

Holden appealed to the other sisters with a squeeze of his eyes. They wouldn’t convince Carmen to come out of the toilet. He’d orphaned the whole family with a target pistol. Red Mike had been the real pater of the house. Leopardo was a guy who liked to strangle people. He could never control the girls. He would have found feeble husbands for them—bricklayers, bums—if Mike hadn’t intervened.

Holden wandered downstairs, said goodbye to Leopardo, and joined Edmundo on the grass. “I don’t want the girls kept prisoner in this house.”

“We’re protecting them, Holden ... they could mutilate each other.”

“That’s their business.”

“And what if Carmen or Luiza comes after you?”

“I’ll duck the hammer next time,” Holden muttered.

“It’s a miracle you still have a head.”

“Edmundo, I’m serious. Carmen goes free.”

“I heard you. Carmen goes free.”

“And how did Leopardo get out of the can?”

“His sons are dead. I got him a weekend pass.”

“This isn’t the weekend.”

“I can’t help it if the Department of Corrections doesn’t keep better tabs.”

“Edmundo, I want him returned in one piece.”

“Why are you so considerate of your enemies?”

“He’s not my enemy. I happened to kill all three of his sons.”

And then Holden saw khaki checkers of cloth beyond the gate.

There was a soldier, all right. Holden hadn’t spun him out of the turban on his head. The soldier had green eyes. A fugitive from St. Albans. He wore a battle scarf and his regimental bands. He had a tie and a clean shirt. The only hint of disorder was his tennis shoes. And Holden wondered if the army had adopted sneakers as part of its new battle dress.

The soldier stood behind the gate and saluted him.

Holden returned the salute and got into the Rolls Royce.

H
E WANTED TO HIDE
out until his head healed. He had four apartments, under different names, where no one but Holden had a key. They were his mattress pads. It was smarter than getting on a plane, because airports could be watched, but a street in Chelsea was only a street in Chelsea. Away from the fur market Holden was as anonymous as any man. He had simpler clothes in his four apartments, a VCR, enough canned goods, bottled water, and video cassettes to keep him for a month. None of his rats knew where the apartments were. Goldie was familiar with one, Mrs. Howard with another, but he could step from apartment to apartment until all his baggage dropped and blurred whoever Holden was.

Sometimes he’d go to one of the apartments and camp there for a week. He could lay the Beretta down in a drawer, retire the silk handkerchiefs, shuck off the tyranny of Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and dress like a scarecrow, put Dietrich on his VCR. But even that wasn’t much of an escape. His dad had loved Marlene, and he couldn’t watch
Destry Rides Again
without thinking of fathers and sons. He’d start to shiver after five or six days, his teeth would knock inside his skull, and he’d remember the twig, that curling body on his marriage bed, the weight of loving her, the lectures she’d give him on Cézanne while they watched the Academy Awards.

“Holden, what the hell is Hollywood to you? I’m talking about a guy who structured the world with apples and pears.”

“Well, I’d rather have Robert De Niro.”

“That proves you’re a thickhead, because actors can only act.”

He should have left her a mannequin at Aladdin Furs, and she wouldn’t have haunted his life. After a week of closets and walls, he’d look for his holster and handkerchiefs and return to civilization.

So he decided not to do his healing all by himself. He’d visit with Loretta Howard and the leopard girl. He arrived late in the afternoon on Oliver Street, entering the front door with his key. Holden was too tired to worry about Bandidos. Mrs. Howard didn’t shriek when she saw the turban on his head. Gottlieb must have phoned in, Gottlieb or another rat.

“Holden, you have too many corpses in the closet. You’d better stop killing people and take a rest. It’s lucky Carmen didn’t have more than a hammer in her hand.”

“A hammer’s enough,” Holden said. “I was unconscious.”

“It did you good. Holden, you have some color in your cheeks.”

“Any messages?” he asked.

“The phone hasn’t stopped ringing.”

“Does anyone know why Big Balls wants me dead? Jesus, I pay an army and we can’t even get the fundamentals down.”

“There are no fundamentals here. Nobody’s established a line between Huevo and the Parrot ... Holden, it has to be the girl.”

Leopard eyes? Holden thought to himself. “She’s with the Bandidos? Did you talk to her about it?”

“Yes. But she keeps insisting you’re her daddy.”

“Maybe I am. Can’t I have a lost daughter somewhere?”

“Crawling under a table while you murder both her babysitters?”

“What if they weren’t babysitters? And it wasn’t an accident the Marielita was there? What if they’d kidnapped the kid?”

“Kidnapping wasn’t their usual line. And would they grab a girl who belonged to the Bandidos?”

“What if they didn’t know who she was? Somebody gives them a girl to hold. I come along. And now I’m the bad guy.”

“It still doesn’t make sense.”

“But it makes more sense than worrying about the Parrot’s itinerary. Mrs. H., we’ve got to go public with the little girl, tell some of our people that she’s in our hands. If nobody claims her in a month, then she’s mine.

“Where’s she going to live? At Aladdin? Holden, you need a wife.”

“I’ll buy one,” he said. “Where is the Marielita? Napping a little? I’d better not wake her.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Howard said. And they stole into the bedroom Mrs. Howard had prepared for the leopard girl, who lay with a lollipop on her chest. She had a child’s even snores. And Holden didn’t care how many dads materialized. He wasn’t giving her away.

The girl woke and smiled at him with her leopard’s eyes. Then she saw the bandages and her body shivered.

“Querida,”
he said. “I’m okay.” And he picked her up inside her little gown, whirled her across the room until he saw spots in the wall.

Mrs. Howard tugged at him. “Holden, you stop that. You’ll both fall.”

But he held the girl tight until the spots disappeared.

Holden lived on Oliver Street for a couple of days. He slept in the foyer, with his ankles in the air, woke in the middle of the night, went through the file cards he kept in Mrs. Howard’s drawer. He sorted out the cards he had on Huevo and put a little portrait together. Lázaro Rodriguez, born in Havana on June 11, 1955, while Castro was hiding in the Sierra Maestra. He didn’t have much luck when the Fidelistas got off their mountain. He was in and out of juvenile facilities after the age of ten. And turned into a regular convict by the time he was seventeen. Holden counted six prisons for Huevo. He’d lost half his teeth and converted to that jailhouse cult of African gods. He was the tattoo artist of La Cabaña penitentiary, Taco-Taco, and El Príncipe. He left his mark in every jail he visited.
Favors eagles,
the notes said.
Eagles and U.S. flags.
Huevo arrived in Miami during the fourth month of the boatlift (July 1980). First seen in New York around September. Recruited by La Familia during the same year. Took part in Don Edmundo’s policy war with the Maf. Formed his own attack squads. Firebombed betting parlors, burned Mafia hitmen alive. But he made a nuisance of himself after the peace. He wouldn’t stop firebombing the policy stores. He left La Familia with some of the Bandidos. He’s been waging war on Edmundo ever since, kidnapping Edmundo’s lieutenants and selling them back to La Familia. Huevo was considered a mad dog. The police, the Maf, and Edmundo were after him. Most of his army was dead. But Huevo survived, protected by a series of
madrinas,
high priestesses who healed his wounds and hid him when they had to. Edmundo kept capturing
madrinas,
but none of them would give Big Balls away.

What the hell could this futile soldier want with him? Was the Marielita Huevo’s child? There was nothing about a marriage in Holden’s cards, and a lot of Changó’s followers weren’t so romantic about women. Was Big Balls supposed to be a troubadour, worshipping some Doña Isabel, when he’d lived his young manhood entirely with men?

Suppose the little girl wasn’t a Marielita at all? She might have had nothing to do with the boatlift. Some accidental child in the Parrot’s hands when Holden had come to kill him. Then what could it be? Holden hadn’t insulted the god in the red dress. He hadn’t made love to a
madrina.
What could it be?

Holden had his rest on Oliver Street and returned to Aladdin, after Loretta changed his bandages. None of the cutters dared mention the turban he wore. Even Nick Tiel was reticent; Nick was preoccupied with the Paris show. His eyes would glaze soon, and Holden would have to escort him everywhere.

“Maybe you ought to go to Paris, Nick. Paris would appreciate you. You wouldn’t have so many Greeks ready to cut your throat. You could eat with the Swisser at Maxim’s. They’d kiss your hand ...”

“You know I never travel,” Nick said.

“It’s a pity, Nick, because all the French furriers swear by your coats. You’d meet a lot of your fans. Why should Swiss take all the credit? You’re the designer, for Christ’s sake?”